June 04, 2009 03:59 PM UTC

Obama Not a Secret Muslim After All

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• by: Yokel

So I had the pleasure of watching CNN-International’s coverage of the exciting speech in Cairo by our President.  On the whole, it was standard Obama – long on platitudes, short on reality, and full of your standard community organizer “You kind of suck, but if you do what I say, you’ll be better” shtick.  Which I think is fine, in this case, because the audience does kind of suck at the modern world.  

But something kept bugging me:  The great, bolded sub-title emblazoned on the screen:

OBAMA SPEAKS TO MUSLIM WORLD.

That bugged me.  At first, I thought it was because it seemed rather “President of the World” presumptuous.  But that wasn’t it.  

Then it hit me.  It was the concept itself.  Barack Obama claiming to “Speak to the Muslim World” was absurd, ignorant, and dangerous.  

It was absurd because the “Muslim World” ought not really care what Barack Obama has to say to them.  What does he matter – he’s still going to act as The Instrument of American national interests, not theirs.  It’s his job description.

It was ignorant, because the “Muslim World” is comprised of over a billion people, spread all over the world, of all different races, ethnicities, languages, and even beliefs: Arabs, Persians, West Africans and Indonesians, Sunni and Shia, Salafist and Sufi.  They aren’t a homogeneous “world” to whom a person can speak – not even President Obama.  And, as someone who seems to consider it a strength on this topic that he spent some of his formative years in Indonesia – the world’s largest Muslim country, but a country that’s clearly not Arab, and where Islam is strongly tempered with mystical Sufi practices and beliefs, as well as hybridized with local indigenous animism.  He should know better.  But it’s clear he doesn’t.

And it was dangerous, because there is someone else who tries to talk about the “Muslim World” as a homogeneous entity of the Ummah: Osama bin Laden.  That is the chief objective of the grand strategy of al Qaeda – unite all Muslims under one banner of Islam again.  Western ignorance has played into that hand in the past, and apparently it may do so in the future.  But it cannot be so, if we hope to defeat al Qaeda.  We need to divide that imaginary group into its real components, and treat them as they are, not as the enemy wants them to be.  (Insert more blah, blah, blah, Global Counterinsurgency Theory that doesn’t really apply here).  

Turns out there was someone else with the same aspirations of “Muslim World” unity:

Khomeini reduced this all to one big idea: Being a Muslim means opposition to the West, especially the United States. This is Khomeini’s Muslim world-not a caliphate or a wonderful mosaic of various practices and beliefs, but a unity forged on the anvil of resistance. This concept is what bridges, for instance, Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, a Sunni organization, and Hezbollah, Lebanon’s Shiite militia.

Read the linked article, if you want more info.  It’s really quite interesting.  Besides, you don’t want to take a conservative hack who’s read too much counterinsurgency theory at his word, would you?

In the end, we learned one thing: When it comes to understanding Islam, Barack Obama is as ignorant as George Bush was.  That rather disappointed me, to be honest.  

How hard would it have been to say “Arab World?”